I often use information tokens for my players to read what they might hear,see,smell,feel when entering any one room,area, or part of the outdoors. Is it possible for the token to emit a sound when clicked on? For example, if they were in a forest and entered an area where a nearby bear was grunting or scrathcing a tree, or perhaps wolves howling in the distance? Maybe a group of orcs singing fight songs in a camp just over that ridge? It would be cool for the player to hear it on the computer they are using ( we LAN all our games ) and each player could then click on it as they arrive at that info token.

It's possible to open webpages via macro, and it's possible to have macros run on mouseover and on selection-change, so if you had a webpage set up to play sounds there might be ways to cobble something together.

ok cool. I have tried the link to a web page. While this does work it is a bit on the "timely" side. I have 3 players and we are all on a LAN. This type of link requires a page to open, then load up a player, then play the sound. Now I am no programmer but have been looking through all the macro commands. Is it possible to use the EXECLINK command to provide a sound directly from the directory I have the sound file in?

Also, in regards to the chat box, it dings when you send a text, is there something within the chat systme that would allow a differnt sound to be played? If so is there a seperate set of commands just for that which sould be used or changed to accomplish the same thing?

There has been discussion about adding an audio manager to MT. While playing a sound is simple enough, the specifics become more work. There's managing the locations where sound files are kept, controlling the sound while it's playing (stop/pause/resume/fast-fwd/rewind), being able to queue up multiple tracks so that they play in order, fade-ins and fade-outs so that multiple tracks tie together seamlessly, and so on.

And part of doing all of the above is building a user interface that will be (relatively) easy to understand and use.

MT 1.4 will be much more modular in its design (this won't necessarily be visible to the user but it will be to the developer) and that modularity would allow something like this to be integrated into MT with less work once it's written.

I love the idea, and sound support in Java isn't particularly difficult. My guess is that the app just doesn't have any plumbing for sound.

Not particularly difficult but also not particularly good. Well actually that is being rather charitable. In truth the built in support for Java just plain sucks. Maybe if someone wanted to pick it up in 1.4 they could integrate FMOD (there are java bindings for it) which would allow for sound to be done decently.

There has been discussion about adding an audio manager to MT. While playing a sound is simple enough, the specifics become more work. There's managing the locations where sound files are kept, controlling the sound while it's playing (stop/pause/resume/fast-fwd/rewind), being able to queue up multiple tracks so that they play in order, fade-ins and fade-outs so that multiple tracks tie together seamlessly, and so on.

And part of doing all of the above is building a user interface that will be (relatively) easy to understand and use.

MT 1.4 will be much more modular in its design (this won't necessarily be visible to the user but it will be to the developer) and that modularity would allow something like this to be integrated into MT with less work once it's written.

Does it need ALL the bells and whistles right from the start? How about a simple "When you click this token this wav file plays." with maybe an option of "when you unselect this token sound stops".

People could then just start with simple sound affects like door creaks, screams, a battle cry, etc. If people want to attach large/long files, so be it, as long as they know the limitations.

And to start off, the wav (and/or mp3) files should just reside in the campaign file as an asset just like any other token/graphic.

We're talking about a forms-based open-source UI application. I think in this light it would serve quite admirably.

ARGH! I've been trolled!

Ok let me list just a few of the problemsit does not work consistently across platforms, works best on Linux/solaris if you have right sound card and configure it, works ok on Mac (but no midi), will make you cry on windows.Some sound cards have annoying pops when sound starts.On windows/mac no mixing at all not even hardware, so if something else is playing maybe the sound wont play,or maybe the sound will play but your voice communication software won't, or maybe everything will sound bad, or maybe you get that annoying hum, or maybe just maybe you are lucky and it works. Its different based on sound card/os/driver.

FMOD may offer a lot more functionality than we need, but it also offers the one thing we really do need and that's a sound library that works consistently (and well on every platform) so that every time some one logs a bug with sound causing issues we don't have to reply "bad luck, can't reproduce it and don't think it's fixable".

Well my basic interest was to merely play a 1-5 second clip of a sound. Not theme music or any kind of track.Pandora suits me better for the background music.

I simply was curious as if this was possible, one would be able to add "noise(s)" to the game moreso to make the players stand up and pay attention to the moment at hand as if something could be happening they need to notice. Or then again maybe not, just to mess with them. I like doing that.

But I'm not going to commit patches for something that is only partially implemented and that would need to be replaced with something else in the future. That's just not worth the effort of merging.

Now if there's a library that does your "simple stuff" and can be extended later with little or no changes to the code needed to support the "simple stuff", then it might be worth looking into. But I'm reluctant to commit dead-end code...

Surely you understand that when someone asks for "just one thing" it always blossoms into a much larger feature set later? And one thing that programmers don't like is "feaping creaturism" (oops, I mean "creaping featurism"). It produces a product that is never "done", and something which doesn't have clear milestones and delivery dates makes for programmers who lose motivation as nothing is ever officially complete.

Surely you understand that when someone asks for "just one thing" it always blossoms into a much larger feature set later? And one thing that programmers don't like is "feaping creaturism" (oops, I mean "creaping featurism"). It produces a product that is never "done", and something which doesn't have clear milestones and delivery dates makes for programmers who lose motivation as nothing is ever officially complete.

Hmmm I am guilty of that. No really, I only have just a few more items that really need "fixing".

_________________I save all my Campaign Files to DropBox. Not only can I access a campaign file from pretty much any OS that will run Maptool(Win,OSX, linux), but each file is versioned, so if something goes crazy wild, I can always roll back to a previous version of the same file.

Get your Dropbox 2GB via my referral link, and as a bonus, I get an extra 250 MB of space. Even if you don't don't use my link, I still enthusiastically recommend Dropbox..

OK, fresh on the heels of a gaming session last night, here are the sorts of things I want, high-level functionality-wise:

Having audio associated with a token, playable via a right-click action ("signature" audio)

playing audio on specific macro invocation

playing specialized audio on Initiative changes

when a PC is activated

when an NPC is activated

when a round changes

I understand that having a macro function for sounds would make all of this possible, but baking some of it into the dedicated MapTools UI would make the barrier to use much lower (and therefore speed group acceptance of the feature set).

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